


By Trial & Error

by krakens



Category: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Genre: Babysitting, F/F, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-28
Updated: 2013-03-28
Packaged: 2017-12-06 18:11:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/738624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krakens/pseuds/krakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here’s what happens when you’re the only person in your family who doesn’t have kids and you and your girlfriend work from home: you basically get used as a daycare service when your sisters drag their husbands out for a rare and well-deserved summer vacation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Trial & Error

Here’s what happens when you’re the only person in your family who doesn’t have kids and you and your girlfriend work from home: you basically get used as a daycare service when your sisters drag their husbands out for a rare and well-deserved summer vacation. It’s a pretty sweet deal, Lydia thinks. She’s not ready yet for the commitment of being a parent (this little ten day stint has reminded her of that fact acutely), but she does love spending time with her gaggle of nieces and nephews.

They’re a handful, though. Between Jane and Bing, Lizzie and Darcy, and Fitz and Brandon (who are functionally a part of the family), there are five kids to look after. By force of habit, Lydia does a quick mental headcount of who’s where. Lizzie and Darcy’s ten month old Charlie is (mercifully) sleeping soundly for once. After an eventful day at the zoo with Gigi, Jane and Bing’s daughters are also conked out – Eleanor and Marion in their trundle bed next door, their little sister Maggie here on Lydia’s lap while she watches the TV on low volume. Gigi is getting Fitz and Brandon’s son Theo ready for bed, which is perfect, because Glee starts in twenty minutes.

Lydia’s just getting ready to carry Maggie to bed when Gigi pokes her head into the living room, her green-grey eyes wide with panic. The guilty and vaguely horrorstricken look on her face tells Lydia everything she needs to know in a second.

“What happened?” she asks quietly, moving Maggie off her lap gently but with purpose and speed. Gigi flounders for a second (for all her considerable talents, keeping an even head in crisis situations is not one of them).

“I lost the baby,” Gigi says.

“What do you mean, you lost him?” Lydia has to press. Gigi’s eyes flick back and forth across Lydia’s face quickly as her lips twitch into a frown.

“I don’t know where he is. I swear I only left the room for five seconds, and when I got back, I couldn’t…” she trails off, babblings half-sentences. First things first, Lydia thinks. She runs her hands up and down Gigi’s arms in a comforting motion as she speaks.

“It’s okay,” she says. “Look, the security system is armed, so we know he didn’t leave the house.” Gigi nods fervently, but doesn’t look any calmer for it. “He’s probably just hiding,” Lydia says. “Yeah, kids do that all the time after they learn how to walk. We just have to find him.”

“How?”

“Think like a kid?” Lydia suggests with a shrug. Gigi nods, the dull panic on her face replaced with focus and resolve. “Okay, you go look. Start where you left him.” Gigi takes off down the hallway without another word, although the way she holds her arms tensely at her sides belies her anxiety.

Sighing, Lydia returns to the sofa and picks Maggie up, taking her back to the guest bedroom she’s sharing with her sisters. The Santa Monica bungalow that Gigi and Lydia have commandeered as their own is actually the smaller of the two properties the Darcys own in Los Angeles, but it’s still got four bedrooms and plenty of places to hide, so she doesn’t waste any time in re-joining Gigi to help with the search.

As she goes, she checks first the bedroom that Theo is supposed to be sharing with Charlie and then hers and Gigi’s, but both are empty at a cursory glance. When she catches up with Gigi, she finds her in the last of the bedrooms, which has been converted into a web content studio. Gigi is checking under her desk.

“I don’t think he’d fit under there,” Lydia points out, and Gigi jumps and gives a huffy sigh.

“Well, I don’t know,” Gigi sighs. “I didn’t play a lot of hide and seek as a kid.”

“I did. But I always lost. I wish Jane was here…” she trails off. “I checked the bedrooms already. No luck here?”

“No.” Gigi slumps down to the ground, pressing her hands to her eyes. “They’re gonna kill me,” Gigi moans.

“No, they’re not,” Lydia says, crossing the room and offering Gigi a hand to help her stand. “Because we’re going to find him. He’s five. He can only have gotten so far.” Gigi cracks a smile at that and stands up, smoothing her skirt out as she does.

Lydia’s reassurances only last through the second sweep of the house. By the third she’s on the verge of having a breakdown. They’re in their room and Lydia is checking under the bed when Gigi flops down on the mattress, clearly seconds away from tears.

That’s when Theo sits up groggily from under a pile of decorative throw pillows. They have like dozens of them and Lydia’s never been particularly fond of them. She thinks very briefly that this will make a good case to get rid of some of them.

Gigi scoops up Theo in her arms and hugs him tightly and asks him what he was even doing. The answer to this is apparently “pillow fort napping”, and Lydia mentally adds that to her post-kids-going-home to do list immediately. After some very gently reprimanding on Gigi’s part, they put him to bed. They even manage to do all of this without waking up Charlie.

Seriously. Miraculous.

Their thorough search and rescue mission does, however, mean that they are 15 minutes late to Glee, but they still curl up on the sectional sofa in the living room and watch together. Or really Lydia watches and Gigi curls up by her side, pressing her nose into her shoulder and intermittedly sighing deeply.

“You okay?” Lydia asks during a commercial break. Gigi gives her head a tiny shake.

“I’m just really _bad_ at this,” she says quietly.

Lydia knows that Gigi has been stressing about this all week. She knows that it’s different for Gigi. Lydia has always pictured herself having kids eventually, in some amorphous future of hers, but it’s never seemed immediate. It’s always seemed far off. Something she’d like to do eventually.

But for Gigi, Lydia knows, it’s all in her game plan. They’ve talked about it before – Gigi’s been mentioning it since Fitz and Brandon began the adoption process and she’s been talking about it nearly nonstop since Lizzie had announced she was pregnant.

“No you’re not,” Lydia says. “Shut up, you’re doing fine.”

“Eleanor got away from me at the zoo today, too.”

“Kids wander off,” Lydia says. “There’s a reason those kid leash things exist.” Gigi contemplates this thought for a moment as she if she might be willing to buy a child leash or two for their next excursion.

“And it’s only been a week,” she continues after a second. “Can you imagine if we had to—” She cuts herself off, a faint blush rising to her cheeks.

“First of all,” Lydia says, pausing the TV as the show comes back on the air. “We’ve been doing a freaking awesome job. And secondly, if we had our own kid we’d probably only have one to look after and not an entire pre-school class.”

“That’s true,” Gigi says, running a hand through her hair.

“See? Nothing to worry about.” She moves to unpause the TV but Gigi speaks again.

“I mean, that’s easy for you to say,” she says. “You’re so much better with kids than I am.”

“Gigi,” Lydia sighs, setting the remote down. “What’s up?”

“It’s just…” Gigi plays with the hem of her skirt while she speaks. “I don’t know. I guess I thought that someday I’d just… wake up and be a grown up and be ready for all these responsibilities. And now it just keeps… not happening, and I feel like I’m running out of time.”

“You’re super responsible,” Lydia says. “I mean, come on. We do like twenty peoples’ worth of jobs by ourselves and our company is way successful.”

“We have a youtube channel,” Gigi sniffs. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Tell that to our hundreds of thousands of subscribers,” Lydia says, poking her in the shoulder. She smiles weakly.

“It’s just different than I thought it would be.”

“But not bad, right?”

“No, not bad.” Gigi laughs. “I mean, it feels more like fun than work.”

“ _And_ loving what you do for work is like the ultimate measure of success in adulthood. True fact. So you’re responsible _and_ successful.” She rests her head against Gigi’s shoulder and mumbles into the crook of her neck as she continues. “And gorgeous, and talented, and…”

“Stooop,” Gigi laughs, pushing her away. Lydia smirks. “Come on,” she says. “We still have Glee to watch.”

“Hey,” Lydia says, thinking back to the abominably large pile of throw pillows on their bed. “Want to finish watching Glee in a pillow fort?”

“Yes,” Gigi replies immediately. “I really, really do.”

**Author's Note:**

> According to the timeline I made for the kids' ages in this fic, Gigi and Lydia are watching the 11th season of Glee.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] By Trial & Error](https://archiveofourown.org/works/756541) by [exmanhater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exmanhater/pseuds/exmanhater)




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